Ava 0.5.9 - Synced Lyrics and a New Music Experience
The headline feature in Ava 0.5.9 is a new synced-lyrics system and detailed music interface. This release also reorganizes media-player and volume settings and improves playback and connection reliability across a wider range of Android devices.
Detailed Music Player and Synced Lyrics
The music overlay now offers two styles. Synced lyrics are not shown in the default Minimal style; switch to Full metadata to enable them.
- Minimal keeps the familiar compact album-art presentation.
- Full metadata adds larger playback metadata, progress and transport controls, plus time-synced lyrics when a matching lyric is available.
The detailed layout adapts to different screen sizes and orientations. Lyrics follow the current playback position and can be fine-tuned from the player when their timing needs adjustment. Tracks without a lyric match continue to use the normal metadata layout.
Enable it at: Ava Settings -> Interaction -> Media Player -> Media Overlay Style -> Full metadata
Reorganized Media and Volume Settings
Media settings are now separated into clear Home Assistant and Music Assistant sections. Home Assistant media-player exposure, the playback overlay and the entity used for artwork and metadata can be configured independently from the Sendspin player and its controls.
A new Sync with volume keys option sends changes from the device's physical media-volume controls back to the configured Home Assistant media player. This also fixes physical volume changes not being reflected correctly on Facebook Portal devices. Thanks to the report and testing in #106.
Path: Ava Settings -> Interaction -> Media Player
Music Playback Fixes
Fixed Sendspin FLAC playback failures on some devices when incoming fragments did not contain stream information, while also reducing repeated decoder error logs.
The previous Device Volume / Software Volume mode selector has been removed. The two concepts were easy to misunderstand, and software volume could conflict with physical system-volume controls. Ava now uses one consistent device media-volume path for Music Assistant and physical volume keys.
Reconnecting, changing tracks or resuming playback no longer allows the server group volume to unexpectedly override the device's remembered volume and start playback too loudly, while upstream device-volume control continues to work.
The detailed player can also continue calculating playback progress from the last valid media position when Home Assistant stops sending frequent position updates, with periodic upstream corrections.
Voice and Connection Reliability
Streaming TTS now automatically falls back to URL playback when the server announces a stream but no usable audio arrives, preventing silent voice replies while avoiding duplicate playback if late stream data appears.
Thanks to @alexreddy78 for the Streaming TTS report and continued testing in #89.
Service startup and recovery have been improved for newer Android versions, including the foreground-service requirements introduced on Android 14 and later. Ava is now more resilient during app startup, service restarts and Home Assistant or Sendspin reconnections.
This release also includes general stability improvements for media overlays, device-specific audio behavior, Bluetooth coordination and the host interfaces used by Mods. No new Mods are included in 0.5.9.
Thanks
Thanks to everyone who reported issues, tested device-specific behavior and helped shape this release:
- @lone-baggie for reporting and testing Portal media-player volume synchronization in #106.
- @deergitseason for the original report of wake-word failure after a Portal reboot in #104. After the reported case recovered in 0.5.8, Ava continued investigating the deeper startup path and improved cold-start, mDNS registration and service connection ordering in this release.
- @alexreddy78 for the Streaming TTS report and testing in #89.
- Feedback and design work for the detailed music overlay are tracked in #108, and Home Assistant voice-call control work is tracked in #102.
